Round-trip Support for Invasive Software Composition Systems

2009 research paper

In Proc. of 8th International Conference on Software Composition (SC’09), volume 5634 of LNCS, Springer
with: Roland Samlaus, and Mirko Seifert

The ever increasing complexity of software systems promotes the reuse of software components to a topic of utter importance. By reusing mature parts of software, large systems can be built with high quality. The Reuseware Composition Framework can compose components written in arbitrary software languages. Based on metamodeling these components are merged invasively. But, even though language independent composition is powerful to compose complex systems, one must consider that composition is not the only activity in developing a working systems by reuse. Many tests and validations can only be performed on the composed system. At that point, it is hard to (a) know from which component an error originates and (b) ascertain what the implications of changing something in the composed system are.

This paper presents an approach to propagate changes back to the correct source components and discusses the possible implications of changes made to composed systems. Furthermore, the implementation of the approach as an extension to the Reuseware Composition Framework is presented using two example applications.